Mobile Heavy Vehicle Detection and Classification System

Category

Smart Transport Infrastructure Award

Submitting Organisation

National Heavy Vehicle Regulator

Collaborating Partner

SenSen

In late 2021 the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR) and SenSen commenced a project to deliver real-time heavy vehicle intelligence to the NHVR.

The resulting world-first Mobile Heavy Vehicle Detection & Classification system (MACP) allows the NHVR to collect real-time intelligence on road network usage by heavy vehicles, and perform subsequent compliance operations if required. With 2 ANPR and 1 sighting camera and associated illuminators, LIDAR and GPS all connected to an NVidia powered Edge Processing system, the Roadside Trailer and Vehicle Lightbar systems use Deep Learning and Live Fusion to combine all these inputs into a single sighting of heavy vehicles.

The Drone Mounted solution uses a high resolution camera and paired laser illuminator to capture vehicles travelling at 100kph from convenient and safe roadside locations. Each sighting contains 15 data points describing the heavy vehicles attributes including axle and articulation counts. Travelling securely over the Telstra IPWAN network, the sightings are received by SenSen’s back-office system, securely hosted in the NHVR’s Microsoft Azure environment, and then handed off in real-time to the NHVR Risk Engines hosted in the same environment.

When a sighting is received, the Risk Engines are able to determine potentially non-compliant heavy vehicles and use geolocation to notify nearby NHVR officers, providing real-time decision support for compliance operations. Sightings that don’t result in compliance activities contribute to an overall picture of the use of the road network by heavy vehicles. Deployed successfully in South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania, the Roadside Trailer, Vehicle Lightbar and Drone Mounted MACP solutions have captured tens of thousands of sightings in the first few months of operation.

The project required significant collaboration between NHVR’s operations teams, data science teams, IT providers and SenSen’s AI and field engineers.